Understanding the conflict three years on.

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December 2021, a Moscow kitchen. It’s close to New Year’s—a time when, according to Soviet lore, miracles were possible—but the conversation among three women is no more cheerful than the winter night outside.

“At 27, I’ve become a very dangerous person for the state,” Irina Dolinina says. She is a journalist with the investigative media outlet that, among other things, ran an exposé on one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s daughters and the fortune amassed by her once-husband.

December 2021, a Moscow kitchen. It’s close to New Year’s—a time when, according to Soviet lore, miracles were possible—but the conversation among three women is no more cheerful than the winter night outside.

“At 27, I’ve become a very dangerous person for the state,” Irina Dolinina says. She is a journalist with the investigative media outlet that, among other things, ran an exposé on one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s daughters and the fortune amassed by her once-husband.

“I’ve already buried colleagues,” Dolinina says. “I live my life not feeling safe anywhere. … My colleagues get drugs planted on them. My colleagues get jailed as spies. My colleagues get murdered.”

In the documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, Russian American director Julia Loktev follows a group of independent female journalists whose job is to tell the truth in a place where truth has been banned. In doing so, she offers an extended view of what it’s like to be slowly strangled by an authoritarian state, where every institution is sharpened toward satisfying the grim urges of the man at the top.

For the last 25 years, that man has been Putin. A former KGB lieutenant colonel, he is obsessed with rooting out enemies, domestic and foreign alike. Media has always been at the top of his list: Within a year of his first inauguration in 2000, Putin orchestrated the state takeover of NTV, Russia’s premier independent television channel, and he hasn’t stopped since. Reporters who challenged him were sidelined, satirical shows mocking him pulled off the air, and editorial teams at critical outlets swapped for government-friendly ones.

The assault on media unfolded alongside a steady squeeze on civil society, including nongovernmental organizations, activists, and watchdogs. In 2012, in the wake of anti-Putin protests, the Russian parliament enacted a foreign agent law allowing the Ministry of Justice to designate Russians suspected of being under the influence of other countries as foreign agents.

The term “foreign agent” itself is borrowed from the Stalin era, when authorities were busy hunting so-called enemy agents, interventionists, and provocateurs. As resurrected by Putin’s regime, the designation originally targeted NGOs that received foreign funding and engaged in vaguely defined “political activity.” In the years that followed, it extended to media organizations, then to individuals who dared to work in organizations that criticize the authorities.

The foreign agent law works in tandem with the “undesirable organizations” law passed in 2015, after Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the wave of Western sanctions that followed. The law gave the Prosecutor General’s office and the Ministry of Justice authority to ban foreign-affiliated groups deemed a threat to Russia’s security and was widely seen as a way to cut off U.S. and European funding for civil society. Putin has long been concerned about foreign money fueling dissent. For instance, he has famously accused the West of financing Ukraine’s 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution, which ousted a pro-Russian president.

Over the years, this worldview has been codified into laws that make targets out of dissenters of all stripes. My Undesirable Friends focuses on several of them. It is divided into five chapters of around an hour each; a second installment, Part II – Exile, is currently being edited. The film follows these women designated as foreign agents (many of whom worked for organizations that were deemed undesirable) in the weeks before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It is at once a female odyssey, a historical record, and a hard look at an unraveling society on the edge of the abyss.

Dozhd reporters Irina Dolinina (left) and Ksenia Mironova, featured in My Undesirable Friends, live in exile after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime took its persecution of........

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